Audacity Effects

[neverfoundthetime]

I'm voting for Audacity here too! Best piece of free software I know.

I always record any audio track with Audacity. I have been using my laptop so far so I'm looking forward to using a mic next.
I use the following mostly:

Generate Silence ... to wipe out any unnecessary sound especially all the space between the sounds used on each track so that there is no buzz or fuzzy sound or overload when everything gets mixed. Tricky one th use first time as you have to mark and click carefully or it'll add time to the track instead of wiping the time bracket you wanted to silence.

Effect / Amplify ... mostly to reduce the decibel level so that there's no distortion. On Melancholy Man I repeatedly reduced the volume on the vocal tracks in steps of 1Db until the vocals were not too over-powering. I only reduce the Db level but not increase it with amplify to avoid distortion.

Sometimes use the Echo feature

Duplicate Track... then off set one track by about 0.07 seconds to get a richer sound

I couldn't get the noise reduction to work properly so I stopped trying. Obviously, I don't quite know how to handle that.

Not yet tried changing pitch but I will have a go soon to get the bass sound Daryl suggests.

Dan could you explain what High Pass and Low pass is all about... no idea! You'll have to use slow words and preferably draw pictures for me so I get it !!

[wrench]

willem wrote:

when reading this thread i find it all impressive and i got my boss micro br but i also want to know more 'baut audacity and need some more explains,,

So Dan can i get you out you cave and explain what that kind of stuff above mensiond and what it does..

Willem, Audacity and similar programs are digital recorders and digital signal processors. To record, they collect digital sound signals. To do anything with the signals it collected, it runs mathematical processes on the signals to change the sound they represent. For example, you could turn on your mic and record a C note. Then using the equalizer, you can reduce the the loudness of bands of frequencies other than the one the C is in (263 Hz if I remember right). The result would be a quieter recording because all the background noise and electrical interference, etc. would be filtered out. Graphically, sound is represented by the shape of its wave. Digital signal processors change the shape of the wave through calculations, and therefore the sound. The basis of all this is the FFT, or the Fast Fourier Transform. Remember basic Algebra when we had to factor polynomials, that is, break a math expression into the pieces that made up the expression? The FFT does that with the waves of signals. It takes a complex waveform produced over a time domain and identifies the component frequencies and corresponding amplitudes that produced the original wave. Having calculated FFT's by hand many years ago, I could never have imagined these things being solved in real time.

Hardware digital processors like your Boss Micro do the same thing, except all the processing is built into the chips instead of a separate software package. Years ago, our PC's weren't fast enough to run software signal processors fast enough to perform in real time, so then the solution was hardware processors. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but at the end of the day, they both work well. Personally I find the more full-featured hardware devices and software packages both intimidating and full of features I don't need. Audacity fits me just right.

All of the effects available in Audacity are algorithms to change the shape of the waves of the original sound. Their website has pretty good explanations of all the features in Audacity. Honestly, I have never used them all. I do more analysis than recording, but I intend to record more in near future. In any event, I can't envision my needs exceeding Audacity's capabilities.

[ffsooo3]

neverfoundthetime wrote:

I'm voting for Audacity here too! Best piece of free software I know.

I always record any audio track with Audacity. I have been using my laptop so far so I'm looking forward to using a mic next.
I use the following mostly:

Generate Silence ... to wipe out any unnecessary sound especially all the space between the sounds used on each track so that there is no buzz or fuzzy sound or overload when everything gets mixed. Tricky one th use first time as you have to mark and click carefully or it'll add time to the track instead of wiping the time bracket you wanted to silence.

Effect / Amplify ... mostly to reduce the decibel level so that there's no distortion. On Melancholy Man I repeatedly reduced the volume on the vocal tracks in steps of 1Db until the vocals were not too over-powering. I only reduce the Db level but not increase it with amplify to avoid distortion.

Sometimes use the Echo feature

Duplicate Track... then off set one track by about 0.07 seconds to get a richer sound

I couldn't get the noise reduction to work properly so I stopped trying. Obviously, I don't quite know how to handle that.

Not yet tried changing pitch but I will have a go soon to get the bass sound Daryl suggests.

Dan could you explain what High Pass and Low pass is all about... no idea! You'll have to use slow words and preferably draw pictures for me so I get it !!

Chris, Instead of "Generate Silence" I select the area of a track that's noise and that will not be used in a track (like when I'm waiting around to play a little riff in between verses) and use "Edit->Silence Audio". And after "Duplicate Track" I'll pan one track far right and the other track far left and offset one of the tracks by as much as .030 seconds for a pronounced stereo effect.

[wrench]

neverfoundthetime wrote:

I'm voting for Audacity here too! Best piece of free software I know.

I always record any audio track with Audacity. I have been using my laptop so far so I'm looking forward to using a mic next.
I use the following mostly:

Generate Silence ... to wipe out any unnecessary sound especially all the space between the sounds used on each track so that there is no buzz or fuzzy sound or overload when everything gets mixed. Tricky one th use first time as you have to mark and click carefully or it'll add time to the track instead of wiping the time bracket you wanted to silence.

Effect / Amplify ... mostly to reduce the decibel level so that there's no distortion. On Melancholy Man I repeatedly reduced the volume on the vocal tracks in steps of 1Db until the vocals were not too over-powering. I only reduce the Db level but not increase it with amplify to avoid distortion.

Sometimes use the Echo feature

Duplicate Track... then off set one track by about 0.07 seconds to get a richer sound

I couldn't get the noise reduction to work properly so I stopped trying. Obviously, I don't quite know how to handle that.

Not yet tried changing pitch but I will have a go soon to get the bass sound Daryl suggests.

Dan could you explain what High Pass and Low pass is all about... no idea! You'll have to use slow words and preferably draw pictures for me so I get it !!

The hi-pass and lo-pass filters remove noise at the extremes of the sound spectrum that is usually not music. Back in the tape days, these may have been called hum (low frequency) and hiss (high frequency). The lo-pass filter passes all the frequencies below the setpoint and the hi-pass filter passes all the frequencies above the setpoint. Enabling the filters has the same effect as turning down the lowest and highest bands of the equalizer.

I can't wait to try some of the recording features you and Daryl are using.